Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Magazine Gift Bag Tutorial

This weekend is a major garage sale for our area neighborhood. I am very excited!!! I love garage sales, and even better if it is all in one place. Our kids heard about the garage sale though and wanted to sell something. Because we moved just this past year, they really didn't have anything to sell (or we didn't have anything big to sell to draw people to look at their little things). But they began to think of different things they could sell. One of our sons bought pop to sell, my other son is building a night stand (with some help), and my daughter decided she wanted to sell these flower pins that she made.

The flower brooches are really quite simple to make. If you'd like to make them, you can follow the tutorial here.

Then I ran across this really cute bag you can make from a magazine page. I thought they would be perfect to put the brooches in when she sells them.

Aren't they cute?

I found their tutorial a little hard to follow (source), so I wrote my own. But know that my idea came from them.

Pick a page from a magazine. I used the Martha Stewart magazine because the pages are a little larger. But any magazine will do.

Just to let you know from the beginning, some of these pictures are a little blurry. My 10 year old daughter took the pictures and she is still learning how to use the settings on the "big" camera.

Take your page with the smooth side at the top (meaning opposite of the end that was ripped from the magazine).

Take a ruler and place it with the long end up against the smooth end of the page. You want the side of the magazine page that you want to see, to be facing up. Fold the page over the ruler, just the depth of the ruler. Pull the ruler out and make a firm fold.

Now, turn the page upside down. The fold should be underneath. And the side of the page that you like should be on the bottom.

Here it is with the fold underneath.

Next, you are going to have the folded edge on the left and the torn edge on the right. The top should be the shorter end. Pull down that shorter end to just a little over half of the page and fold.

Pull up the other shorter end and fold up so that it overlaps the first fold just about an inch or two.

This will be the width of your bag.

The flap, or your very first fold, should still be on the left side. Take your bottom fold and place it underneath the top fold, just under the little flap. This connects it and makes it one piece.

Pull up the bottom and fold it up to the flap, leaving about .5 cm at the top.

Here you can see the space from the top.

Tuck that fold under the flap. Gently, because you don't want the flap to rip.

This is how it should look now.

Take your ruler and line it up with the edge. The flap should be at the top. Mark with your thumbnail a little notch at the top of the flap, right on the other side of the ruler.

Now do the same thing on the other side.

Next, line up your ruler with the notch on the flap and the bottom corner of the bag.

Fold that piece over the ruler, making a good crease.

Do the same thing on the other side.

Here it is with the flap at the top, and the two folds from notch to bottom corner.

Now, open up the bag.

Push those side creases in, so that it folds in, instead of out. This makes the side of the bag.

Do the same thing on the other side.

It should now look like this.

A view from the top.

Punch four holes into the top of the bag. Two on each side.

What we ended up doing for the handles was braiding yarn, cutting it, and knotting the ends.

Found this post thru Moneysavingmom.com -- LOVE it! I have several free magazine subscriptions that have just recently ended and I really don't need all of them. I love this idea! And it reminds me that I can use the pages for wrapping paper as well, which will be especially fun for wedding and bridal shower gifts with my bridal magazines!

Do you know of an easy way to make these bags larger, though? I'd love to use them for Christmas gifts! Maybe 4 pages glued together or something to make one large sheet?

I think that maybe if you used double sided tape, and overlapped your magazine pages a little it would probably work to make a larger bag. You might need to do a little fold, just to support it a little.

You could probably also use newspaper sheets. Use one and see if it is firm enough, otherwise double up the sheet to give it a little more support. That should get you a slightly larger bag. Maybe also stick a piece of cardboard from a cereal box in the bottom.